Biography

July 9, 1933 · London, England, UK

August 30, 2015 · New York City, New York, USA (cancer)

Oliver Wolf Sacks

Lived in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he swam in the local YMCA pool regularly.

He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to medicine.

One of his first cousins was Abba Eban, Israeli diplomat, author, scholar, narrator of the nine-part TV series "Heritage" (1987) and another TV series. He completed one film, "The Brink of Peace".

[interview in Newsweek magazine, 8/20/84] If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.

[interview in Newsweek magazine, 8/20/84] There is only one cardinal rule: One must always LISTEN to the patient.

[on discovering that the study of modern chemistry was more theoretical than tactile] This seemed an awful prospect, for I - at least - needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses in the middle of the perceptual world. I had dreamed of becoming a chemist, but the chemistry that really stirred me was the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century, not the new chemistry of the quantum age.

[on his patient Spalding Gray] On several occasions he talked about what he called "a creative suicide". On one occasion, when he was being interviewed, he thought that the interview might be culminated with a "dramatic and creative suicide". I was at pains to say that he would be much more creative alive than dead.

It may not he enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one's best in return, is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.